Lexirise vs Inkstone
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Lexirise
Learn languages through engaging content like comics, podcasts, and videos. Tap words for instant translations and save them for spaced repetition reviews. Practice speaking and track your progress with offline study options.
- Learn from comics, podcasts, and videos
- Tap words for instant readings and meanings
- Save words with context sentences
- Spaced repetition reviews
- Speaking practice with feedback
- Offline study and progress tracking
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Stay in the story. Learn the words along the way. Learn Chinese, Japanese, Korean and more from comics, podcasts, captioned YouTube videos, books, and your own uploads. Tap a word for its reading and meaning. Save it with the sentence it came from. Review it later, without building flashcards by hand. Real content can be hard at first. But you don't have to know every word to start enjoying it. Lexirise puts help where you need it, so one unknown word doesn't end your reading session. READ ANOTHER CHAPTER Read manga, manhua, and webtoons with tappable text. See pinyin, furigana, and word meanings without switching to a dictionary. Bring your own books, PDFs, comics, text, and audio too. HEAR THE WORDS YOU'RE READING Follow podcasts with interactive transcripts. Tap a word as you hear it, check the meaning, and keep listening. Watch captioned YouTube videos with word lookup in the app. SAVE THE WORD, NOT JUST THE TRANSLATION Keep useful words with their source sentence, reading, and audio. Sort them into decks and tags, or export them to Anki. Your collection comes from things you chose to read and hear. REMEMBER WHAT YOU MEET Short spaced-repetition reviews bring words back when they need practice. Use reading, typing, and listening modes, or build a study session from your own material. TAKE IT INTO A CONVERSATION Practice speaking with guided missions and feedback. Live Transcript helps you follow conversations and lessons, look up words, and return to saved transcripts. KEEP GOING, WHEREVER YOU ARE Download supported material and reviews for offline study. Track reading, listening, reviews, and streaks. Add a Study Today widget, join the weekly League, or study with friends in a Study Circle. Your words and progress sync across iPhone, iPad, and the web. The included Safari extension adds lookup tools to supported websites. Lexirise is for learners who want to spend more time with the language they love, not follow a fixed course of canned lessons. Start free. Pick a comic or podcast, then tap the first word you don't know. Optional Pro plans unlock higher limits and advanced tools, including speaking practice and Live Transcript. Terms of Use: https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/
Inkstone
Learn Chinese through classic stories and poems. Offers detailed explanations, translations, and audio pronunciations for every word and sentence. Supports offline reading and vocabulary saving.
- Classic Chinese stories and poems
- Modern Chinese retellings
- Audio narration with pinyin
- Tap-to-translate words
- Sentence-by-sentence translation
- Offline reading support
- Vocabulary saving
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Inkstone is a read, listen, & learn Chinese app built on the wisdom that China has passed down for generations. Most language learning apps write their own material for learners. Inkstone gives you classic Chinese wisdom: from fables & their idioms, philosophy, history, to Tang poems, and strange tales. Every piece comes from a real ancient text, and then retold in clear modern Chinese to match the level you can read. Inkstone is built to guide you through every word, every phrase, and every sentence and its historical and philosophical context. A voice reads every line aloud and pinyin sits above every character. Tap any word to see what it means, hear it on its own, and read how the rest of the library uses it. Every sentence has an English translation a glance away. An "unpack the story" analysis is also paired with every story to provide further context and analysis. You never have to leave the page to look anything up, we take care of it all for you. WHAT YOU ACTUALLY READ 412 texts across twenty-four genres: fables, myths, poems, philosophy, histories, strange tales, and street talk. We ship 50+ handpicked stories every month. Li Bai looking at moonlight and mistaking it for frost. Zhuangzi's frog at the bottom of the well, certain the sky is small. A scholar in a Tang ghost story who should not have opened that door. The poems are the original text, character for character, from 唐诗三百首 and 全唐诗. The prose is retold in clear modern Chinese at a level you can read. Sources are always named. This curated collection consists of stories that lasted two thousand years. They're worth reading and analyzing, over and over again. WHY WE CALL THEM CLASSICS Every story comes with an interpretation, what it means, how to use it in everyday life and other contexts, along with commentary on how scholars have argued about it over the centuries. HOW WE GUIDE YOUR READING EXPERIENCE • A female and male voice for every story. Each word and sentence translated and lighting up as you progress through the story. • Slow the reading down, loop a line, or step through a story sentence by sentence • Every word has its own recording in both voices, so you can hear individual words and phrases alone • Beautiful background music to accompany your reading • Four levels of pinyin, including a smart level that marks only the words above your grade • Tap a word for its definitions, its other readings, and how often this book uses it • An English translation for every sentence without having you leave the story • Simplified and traditional characters supported • Save a word and it comes back before you forget it • Works offline. The whole library is stored locally on your phone. Audio is fetched when you open a story. • No ads and no account required. You can optionally backup your progress. LEARNING & PRACTICE Our learning system is based on SRS. Save a word while you read and it'll come back on a schedule optimized for you to master its meaning quickly. A STUDY OF YOUR OWN Inkstone is built as a scholar's studio. You carve your own name seal, and it stamps the spine of every book you finish. Curios collect on the shelf as you read. The window beside your desk follows the hour of your real day. Everything grows as you collect and finish more stories. Download Inkstone and start reading today. The annual plan is $49.99 USD per year and opens with a 7-day free trial you can cancel any time before it ends. Monthly is $9.99 and starts billing straight away. Prices in your own currency are shown in the app before you confirm anything. Terms: https://getinkstone.app/terms Privacy: https://getinkstone.app/privacy
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Verdict
The clearest difference is ads: Lexirise at none against Inkstone's shown. Lexirise also leads on review sentiment (71% vs 50%). Inkstone's advantage is monetization model (free vs free with in-app purchases) and rating (4.1 vs 3.8). On price, ratings volume, update cadence and in-app purchases there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Both are free to download. Lexirise sells 9 in-app purchases, starting at $14.99 per month and Inkstone sells 2 in-app purchases, starting at $9.99 per month. Whichever you choose, the download price is not the number that matters.
Inkstone holds the better App Store score, 4.1 against 3.8. Both are backed by a comparable volume of ratings — 10 and 14 respectively. Written reviews complicate that: 71% of Lexirise's written reviews are positive against 50% of Inkstone's, so the app with the better star average is not the one people write more warmly about.
Lexirise ships an update weekly, Inkstone every 4 days. The most recent releases landed on November 6, 2026 and November 10, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Lexirise | Inkstone |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 3.8 (10 ratings) | 4.1 (14 ratings) — better |
| Positive reviews | 71.4% of reviews — better | 50.0% of reviews |
| Number of ratings | 10 | 14 — better |
| Update frequency | Weekly | Every 4 days — better |
| Ads | No — better | Yes |
| In-app purchases | Yes | Yes |
| Monetization | Free with in-app purchases | Free — better |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad — better | iPhone |
| Requires iOS | 16.4 | 16.4 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 122 MB | 177 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 12+ |
| Developer | Lexirise | Conder Shou |
Customer experience
Lexirise
Inkstone
In-app purchases
Lexirise
- Pro Monthly$14.991 Month
- Pro Monthly Referral Offer$14.991 Month
- Pro Annual Referral Offer7 Days trial$79.991 Year
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- Pro Annual$79.991 Year
- Pro Annual Offer$79.991 Year
- Pro Annual1 Month trial$79.991 Year
- Pro Annual7 Days trial$79.991 Year
- Lifetime$169.99
- Lifetime$199.99
Inkstone
- Inkstone Monthly$9.991 Month
- Inkstone Annual7 Days trial$49.991 Year








